![]() The many functions of the Krebs cycle mean it can explain much about life, Lane argues. ![]() Lane compares it to a furiously busy roundabout, with different vehicles constantly whizzing in from different junctions and hurtling out on others. And cells can run it in various ways, so there is no one Krebs cycle. But Krebs is also a chemical factory, manufacturing key components of cells. Textbooks, he says, essentially treat it as a mechanism for obtaining energy from food. Lane’s thesis is that biochemists have misunderstood the cycle and therefore underestimated it. It is named for biochemist Hans Krebs, who described many details of how it works. Its focus is a biochemical process called the Krebs cycle: a whirlwind of chemistry that spins around in all our cells many times a second. In his last book, The Vital Question, he argued that many of these seemingly disparate mysteries could be explained by life’s reliance on electrically charged particles to power itself. ![]() ![]() One of the most creative of today’s biologists, his work ranges from the evolution of sex and the rise of planetary oxygen to the origin of complex cells and the first life on Earth. Lane’s focus on energy and the essential dynamism of life has been an important thread running through his research. Quoting the poem Like Most Revelations by Richard Howard, he writes that “it is the movement that creates the form”. So argues biochemist and writer Nick Lane in his new book Transformer. IF WE want to understand the nature of life, we have to think about the flow of energy and matter. ![]()
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